Back then we still had only three TV channels and a battery-operated digital watch was considered sci-fi technology.

So, while a total loss of power was a massive inconvenience, people could still work a manual typewriter, file paperwork and more or less go about large parts of life at work and at home, at least during hours of daylight.

Try to imagine what a total, UK-wide power shutdown, even for just a half a day, would look like now.

Many businesses struggle to cope if they lose email for a day. How on earth could commerce function without the most basic access to a computer or a server?

Tree Hugger

And in a time when patchy mobile phone signal is a cause for foot-stamping disgust, how would the “always-on” generation cope with a total switch off?

No Facebook, no Twitter, no cable or satellite telly, no X-box or Playstation and no mobile devices beyond the few hours of juice in the battery – #shudders.

Energy is the hot topic of the moment. There’s nothing like rising bills to focus the attention of a disgruntled public, particularly while the “Big Six” power companies are creaming in enormous profits.

But it goes beyond that. So many of the stories catching our attention have an underlying energy focus, whether it’s the troubles at the massive Grangemouth petrochemical plant or the Greenpeace protestors jailed in Russia for opposing oil drilling in the Arctic wilderness.

Trouble’s afoot and is likely to get worse. You don’t have to be a militant tree hugger or a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist to know two things.

Firstly our own demand for more and more power is skyrocketing, yet still looks positively peely-wally when measured against the voracious and growing energy appetites of fast-growing economies such as China and India.

Fossil Fuels

Secondly our reserves of fossil fuel are dwindling and increasingly controversial and destructive measures are being used to get at what the planet has left to offer – from fracking across the US, through the exploitation of the Canadian Tar Sands to the rush to drill the Arctic.

All of this is even before we use the ‘N’ word that causes so much division and outrage. Nuclear has its advocates, but who isn’t unsettled by the prospect of French and Chinese money men building Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation in leafy Suffolk?

At home the Scottish Government has a vested interest in maintaining North Sea Oil production to pay for its dreams of independence, but with a canny eye on the future has also pinned its colours to the “renewables” mast, particularly wind and tidal power.

A key theme of the conference will be on how to attract the kind of political and financial backing which will allow these new technologies to flourish.

Smart Cookies

What’s not to love when you hear stats that Scotland has a quarter of Europe’s offshore wind and a tenth of the continent’s tidal potential? All we need is some smart cookie to work out how to turn rain into electricity and we’re sorted.